Maggot mayhem

IN many food establishments in Trinidad and Tobago it is not uncommon to see flies happily buzzing around in glass display cases and rubbing their little hands while settling on food items.

The average employee usually chases such winged offenders away with a slight scowl and a flick of the wrist, some perhaps not caring if the flies return – once the customer is gone and no one is looking.

“What doesn’t kill fattens; what doesn’t fatten purges.”

This common adage is perhaps silently chanted by the average customer or seller who goes ahead with food orders despite fly sightings. After all, flies are an accepted part of our culture and local menu. What little bakery, pie man/woman or food place does not have flies as an added "ingredient"? What home-cooked feast does not have at least one housefly occasionally landing on a dish?

One does not normally consider that the common fly would use our daily food as a habitat for carrying out its four-stage life cycle – eggs, larvae (maggots), pupae, adult flies.

However, many meat eaters throughout Trinidad and Tobago are possibly contemplating vegetarianism after seeing the viral video recently posted by attorney Christlyn Moore, in which she shows graphic footage of a swarm of large maggots infesting the remnants of a beef pie she had just bitten into, chewed and swallowed.

Along with that beef pie, she had also purchased a currants roll. Ms Moore, are you sure that those little black things in your pastry were only currants?

The written public apology swiftly issued by a bakery (alleged to be the seller of the infamous "maggot pie" – as coined by a Facebook user) did little to assuage the wrath and disgust of the Trinidad and Tobago public, many of whom took to social media, calling for the establishment to be shut down – especially after discovering that the incident might not be a "first" (as claimed in the public apology).

Apparently in October 2023 a customer posted a photo on the establishment’s Facebook page, showing a small mass of fly eggs in a meat pie she had allegedly purchased from them.

I would imagine that the owner of the establishment genuinely feels horrible because of these now-revealed occurrences and the resulting social media furore. Mistakes happen, but when it comes to food, some mistakes can have damaging, potentially fatal consequences.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and, in this case, it may be that a lesson has been learned – not just by that bakery, but by food establishments across the nation that will now hopefully be extremely vigilant where hygiene, proper storage and shelf life of edibles are concerned

In some parts of the world, maggots, considered a source of nourishment (protein, good fats and trace elements), are consciously consumed. Maggot protein is purported to be superior to soyabean protein.

Cooking or dehydrating the maggots before eating them renders them a safer dietary addition than they would be raw.

Ingesting live maggots may not harm an individual, as they will not survive in one’s gastric juices; but in cases where they do, affected individuals have been known to experience abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhoea, due to intestinal myiasis.

Despite this, people with courageous culinary tastes willingly consume the Sardinian delicacy
casu marzu (meaning "maggot cheese" or "rotten cheese") – a sheep’s-milk edible created specifically to become a decomposing breeding ground for maggots. Google videos of this cheese and you will see large translucent maggots swarming in the white, softly-textured end product, which one can spread on crackers and bread.

The purported Gorgonzola flavour of the cheese is attributed to the flavour of the excrement produced by the thousands of live maggots present in
casu marzu when it is ready for consumption.

Eating this cheese becomes more adventurous when one considers that maggots can jump as high as six inches – resulting in the consumer having to hold a hand over the cheese to prevent the leaping larvae from entering his/her eyes.

Given the responses to the beef pie video, I imagine that not many Trinidad and Tobago people would be keen on sampling
casu marzu.

The exception may be men desirous of empowering their next sexual conquest. The cheese is considered to be an aphrodisiac – up there on the list of exotic erotic stimulants like tiger-penis soup and ground rhino-horn powder. I recommend that interested men opt for the
casu marzu though, as killing a tiger just for a penis and a rhino just for a horn (or for any other reason) amounts to animal cruelty.